Chaos Quotes

Diseased Nature oftentimes breaks forth In strange eruptions.

The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

Out of chaos, find simplicity, From discord, find harmony.

There is great disorder in the heavens, and the situation is excellent.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.

Where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident, chaos will soon reign.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

I never worry that all hell will break loose. My concern is that only part of hell will break loose and be much harder to detect.

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

How soar sweet music is, when time is broke, and no proportion kept!

Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.

The pieces all fit together. Yet everything was falling apart.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

Chaos is always losing, but never defeated

When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.

and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.

The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded. Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.

Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

We could not help contrasting the equanimity of Nature with the bustle and impatience of man. His words and actions presume alwaysa crisis near at hand, but she is forever silent and unpretending.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection. - The Babies speech 1879

There's only two things you can start without a plan: a riot and a family, for everything else you need a plan.

When the Way governs the world, the proud stallions drag dung carriages. When the Way is lost to the world, war horses are bred outside the city.

It is like sitting in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway with your windows rolled up and Portuguese music booming out of the surround-sound speakers while animals gnaw on your neck and diseased bill collectors hammer on your doors with golf clubs.

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

Life under a good government is rarely dramatic; life under a bad government is always so.

The time is out of joint.

In the middle of chaos lies opportunity.

The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.

Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.

If all simply insist on rights and no duties, there will be utter confusion and chaos.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

It was a murky confusion — here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel — of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.

Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

Battle is an orgy of disorder.

I'm addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos.

Contention, like a horse,Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose,And bears down all before him.

Why is it that all battles are fought in the middle of the night, in downpouring rain, and at the corners of four different maps?

You know the old joke, I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out.

Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark, what discord follows!

Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.

A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!

If Heaven were not clear it might rend. If Earth were not firm it might crumble.

The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

The wind-shak'd surge, with high and monstrous main,Seems to cast water on the burning Bear,And quench the guards of the ever-fixed pole.

Coercion cannot but result in chaos in the end.

If there were reason for these miseries, then into limits could I bind my woes. If the winds rages, doth not the sea wax mad, threat'ning the welkin with its big-swoll'n face? And wilt though have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth.

Either an ordered Universe or a medley heaped together mechanically but still an order; or can order subsist in you and disorder in the Whole! And that, too, when all things are so distinguished and yet intermingled and sympathetic.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

Overcome the Empyrean; hurlHeaven and Earth out of their places,That in the same calamityBrother and brother, friend and friend,Family and family,City and city may contend.

Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.